The house felt oddly quiet, with only two people and a cat in it. It had never been that empty. Even the first time we’d used it, it had been the two of us and Aryennos and Terenei.
We both stripped down and washed up. Serru’s purple clothes were a battered mess of blood and mud. My human-form clothes had picked up a bit from secondary contact since I’d changed, just enough that I really wanted something completely clean for in my house, but it wasn’t really damage since I’d switched to dragon and centaur and aquian through the conflict but not human or felid. Serru pulled on her sky-blue and white dress and then made sure Myu had fresh water; I rummaged around in my bag, found the lightweight bck leggings Terenei had bought for me in Ottermarsh and the blue shirt Serru had given me on my first day here, and figured that would do.
Honestly, in this world, there would have been no particur implications in skipping clothes entirely, but I wasn’t sure I could get my head around that right at the moment.
Then we sank down on the couch, wrapped around each other, and for a long time there was nothing to say.
The world had come terrifyingly close to destruction. What were words going to do, really? The others were, for the moment, not in it but they had a world to come back to. And we were still here.
Myu had a drink, used her litterbox, and jumped up onto our ps. She leaned hard against me, no longer trembling but still not quite settling in and rexing the way she normally did.
“I started the message to Heket by telling her Myu is safe,” Serru said, stroking the little cat. “And that we aren’t sure what’s happening now but as soon as possible we’ll get them back together.”
“I’m sure her first reaction will be to find the first post office she can and check,” I said.
“I sent Jaelis a message and asked her to find the wardens closest to Heket’s home, to tell them. And sent messages to the Brightridge wardens and Terenei’s family and Aryennos’ parents. If they aren’t home yet I’m sure they’ll know who to contact. I didn’t say much, only that they had died abruptly and would likely be agitated, and that all is well now and we’re working on sending them as much of their personal things as we can and we don’t otherwise know what we’re doing next. Ary’s specifically says that his journal is safe. They’ll all have someone there who can tell them immediately that we won.”
“Good. And that is definitely we won. I don’t care if Logan’s right and someone has been maniputing me, if it means that she can’t hurt anyone for a while. I bet we could keep her zombied for more than two years, if Logan and I just make sure we’re waiting outside whatever the nearest Quincunx site is. Poetic justice, really. The only creepy unpleasant part of that is that someone else has to get zombied so I can do that swap.”
“If it will keep her helpless, I’ll volunteer, and keep doing it for the rest of my life, and be gd I can.”
Of course she would.
“I was thinking at first we just needed to stop her long enough for Purification potions to become common, but this mass attack with the spores and those horrible killer pnts are pointing in the direction of the potions not being enough.”
She shook her head. “We still need those. That infection is still out there, even if she isn’t dominating it. I don’t know if it will be possible to eradicate it entirely. If I’m right and dying mosslings created more spores, then Terenei slowed it enormously at a key moment, but we certainly didn’t get all of it.”
At least here I was comfortably certain that ‘shelter in pce’ wouldn’t be treated as a challenge.
“And while Logan has been helpful recently, he still does have a history of doing some bad things. Perhaps there were reasons for some of them that no one has appreciated, but that isn’t true for all of them. Most recently, he hurt you and dropped you in a cave because he was frustrated. I am not saying he is inherently the terrible person we believed him to be, but I think it could be a good thing for those potions to exist, and for him to know they exist.”
“That’s a really good point,” I conceded. “And if she ever gets away from us, or we decide to let her have a chance for some reason, people won’t be helpless. Although maybe we need to tell people to make that pnt-killer stuff Logan was using, too.”
“It’s a very common potion. Farmers and gardeners use it to clear an area before they pnt seeds.”
“Hm. Maybe I can learn that one.”
“There are many potions and reted items that aren’t health-based. There’s a book of all the standard formus, I’m sure we can find a copy.”
“Since I guess I’m here to stay, I should start a shopping list of things I need to get.”
“It won’t be hard. Especially once the news spreads of what just happened. The thanks for the music festival is going to pale in the face of the thanks for stopping her indefinitely.”
“And there’s no way around that, is there.” It wasn’t really a question.
“Drumsong Cascade just died. The entire town, people and animals. Some people will wake up in other settlements, probably frightened. Even just the job of trying to clean up is going to be enormous. The whole world is going to feel this.”
I thought of all the blood soaking the intersection, drained from my friends and I by those pnts, and the hundreds or thousands of bodies of people and animals, and the massive amount of decaying pnt matter. The bodies would vanish. Clothes and possessions would not. I had no idea about the blood or the dead vines.
Drumsong Cascade was a trade hub. It couldn’t go silent without ripples.
And there was the trauma, and experience from back home told me that not all of that would be affecting people at ground zero.
Picking up the pieces was going to be a job that reached into the other provinces and involved absolutely everyone.
“Wardens from the nearest settlements will start to show up very soon,” Serru said quietly. “If Logan tags the message as urgent, then post office workers will be notified of that and can make sure the local wardens get it immediately. For this, wardens will drop everything they are doing and respond. A motivated aquian can move very quickly along the rivers, especially with the current. Others can use riverboats. Centaurs and cervids can run, especially if they feel that a Refresh might be warranted to get a first wave here as fast as possible, and there are ornithians who will be happy to run all-out along Grassnds roads. If there are any dragon wardens, I imagine they can cover any distance quickly in the air. They will organize whatever is needed, even though it’s on a scale that no one has ever seen before.”
I thought of Thelsan instantly taking action at the music festival, of Daivro the centaur warden in Whisperwillow and his partners, even of the long-ago wardens who had greeted Logan in Brightridge and made sure he had a map and supplies. And there were wardens out there who were paramedics, too. “I feel bad leaving it to them...”
“Even the thought of standing up to find food is currently a daunting one. I don’t think we can be of any further help. I think our job right now is to look after ourselves.”
“You’re too sensible.” I hugged her anyway. “I suppose we could just eat travel bars, but maybe we can manage some super-basic soup if we do it together.”
She nodded.
I filled a kettle with water and put it on to boil, while she found the right green stuff to shred into it. When it was hot, we tossed travel bars in to dissolve.
With adrenaline coming down and the possibility surfacing that I might stay alive after all, it was starting to register that I was hungry. Really hungry.
We put a felid travel bar in another kettle with minimal water for Myu, because actually cooking fish for her wasn’t going to happen right now. When it had crumbled enough, we added enough cold water to bring the thick goopy stuff to a better temperature for her and poured it into a bowl, then set it down next to a bowl of milk and a pte with a bit of raw fish and a few bites of cheese. There were no parasites, the fish couldn’t make her sick, but it wasn’t her preferred way of eating it. With any luck, this little buffet would let her find something she’d accept in her current rattled state.
Serru had one serving of the fast soup and some bread and fruit; I had the remaining three servings along with simir amounts of bread and fruit. I started to apologize, but she just smiled.
“Your dragon form seems to have a metabolism simir to a jotun, or even faster, especially under strain. I’ve been close to Zanshe a long time, I’m used to that.”
Food prep and eating took the st of the energy we had. We stumbled upstairs to fall over on the bed.
I don’t know how Serru slept, but I passed out, nightmared, woke up, and was tired enough that I promptly passed out again without the energy to go downstairs for my Drops, several times over. It didn’t help, knowing that those nightmares were of the moment I’d died.
I’d probably done something reckless, running in without checking it was safe, reacting to someone in distress. There were reasons why we weren’t supposed to do that. There were also reasons that all the training in the world couldn’t completely stop it from happening, even in experienced responders. Bancing empathy with self-preservation was tricky.
Had it been a massive multi-vehicle situation on the highway, on a rainy night? I felt cold enough in the nightmares that bck ice might even be a factor. That could expin why there were so many lights. First response from multiple agencies and municipalities all converging in an effort to minimize the damage...
Like wardens converging here, but no one else would die, at least.
I hoped no one else had died in the rain under the tearing lights.
I finally gave up. I’d just have to deal with being tired.
When I started to move away, Serru shifted in her sleep, reaching for me without ever really waking. I moved closer again, hugging her against me, and she settled back into stillness.
She was strong, so resilient and determined, but she’d just faced down her own worst nightmare in the flesh, had died at her hand for the third time, been zombified and resurrected, had seen friends die around her, had almost seen the beginning of the end of everything she knew in a personally traumatic form, had to live now aware that a weaker form of her nightmare existed out there on the loose and it might not be possible to completely eradicate it. That was... a lot.
